Night Time Yowling - STUDY

IMPORTANT: If your cat is in any distress or discomfort, please consult your own vet as your first priority.
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Mollycat
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Night Time Yowling - STUDY

Post by Mollycat »

I came across this article which might be of interest to members present and future, the 2020 published results of on single study of 37 cats conducted in 2018 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341261/
To try to determine possible motivation for or cause of the increased vocalisation, the owners were asked to notice the “major” behaviour(s) of their cat when it was vocalising:
(i) if it looked directly at them and stopped vocalising when they interacted with it, stroked it, picked it up, etc.—this suggested attention seeking
(ii) if it looked at them, then ran to the food bowl—this suggested the cat was seeking a particular resource, in this case food
(iii) if it was on its own, not looking at them or a particular resource, and appeared confused—this suggested disorientation
(iv) if it appeared to be sore when it moved or was touched—this suggested pain.
Attention-seeking and disorientation were by far the most common findings and I would suggest might be pretty much linked, as confusion might be relieved by the appearance of the much-loved human. It seems this is a different phenomenon to the young cat yowling while wandering around the house carrying its favourite toy, don't hold our breath for a study on that one!

But to me the most important lesson in this study is that the experts have no more answers than we owners do, and even come looking to owners through a study like this to see if they can get any closer to answers.
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